"The cooking is everything. If not well done it is positively injurious; if well done it is wholesome."
General Silas Casey, USA - 1862

Consequently, neither Union nor Confederate forces went into the field with standard manuals of cookery, nor with anything like an idea of proper food sanitation and handling. The whole science of nutrition had not yet been born. Manuals for quartermasters and commissaries were adopted by the respective war departments, but again, these extended only so far as to the proper ration to be issued to the man in uniform, and that ration had not changed materially since the days of the Revolution.

Fruit, fresh vegetables, dairy products (especially milk) were entirely absent. It did not mean that the commissaries didn't believe that the soldiers did not need such essentials, only that the governments could not undertake to provide them on a regular basis. It was up to the men themselves, or their officers, to find such things in their locality. One of the first issues (other than preparing for battle) when any army arrived at its destination, was to search for food in the local area. In the beginning of the War in the southern states, for example, Confederate troops were often resupplied with food by local farmers willingly, due to the abundance available. When these same troops ventured to northern states, however, food was less likely to be found.

The diet of the average Southerner, however, quickly went from a pre-war variety of adequate foods to a near-starvation sustenance. Those at home suffered as well, and the enlisted men perhaps even more so. Parched corn, wormy hardtack, "blue" beef and "sowbelly" jerky, goober peas, and perhaps beans and corn bread were typical soldier fare. At Port Hudson and Vicksburg the beleaguered troops ate the meat of rats, dogs, mules, horses, and cane roots, and even grass. It took months for the North to hobble the food supply system of the largely self-sufficient agricultural South, and years to weaken and ensnare the Southern army.

The military authorities' attitude toward what the men ate and how they prepared it was largely a reflection of the time in which they lived. Soldiers dined on much the same raw materials as they had when at home on their farms. Meat was the staple of almost every diet, and they ate it either freshly killed, or preserved by a variety of means from pickling in brine, to smoked, dried, sugar-cured, and even canned in tins. Vegetables (carrots, onions and potatoes) and fruit (apples, pears, plums, cherries, peaches) were the other mainstays, eaten fresh when available, or else dried.

Fruit pies, especially apple and cherry (peach and pumpkin in the south), were universally popular.

Beyond this, regional differences and variations were already making their mark on American tables. The distinctive Creole cooking of southern Louisiana was well established. The stews and barbecues of the backwoods of Tennessee and Kentucky excited the palates of native sons, while Virginia ham, Boston beans, New England chowders, and Indiana fresh corn, all stood out in the fare of their localities.

So, when war erupted in April of 1861 and thousands of men flocked to the colors, means were at least available to get food to them, while their own experience at home had taught them a few rudimentary cookery skills to convert the raw rations into something edible, although not always either nourishing or healthful. There was still a lot to learn, however, for in a regiment of 1,000 men, each might have his own idea of what to eat and how to make it.. Thus a uniformity quickly spread throughout the camp kitchens, imposed in part by the limitations and availability of what was provided, and how the officers passed on their instructions. "Army food" was army food, then as later, and the officials did not go to any great lengths to explain or prescribe exactly how to make it.

 In the end, the fighting men ate what they could get, and cooked it in whatever means was most convenient, or most tasty. The ingedients suggested by the respective commissaries and others may have predominated, but when men were left so much to their own devices, innovations and improvisation, especially in the confederacy, it became a way of life. A group of Confederates in South Carolina made a meal of rats, finding that "rat tasted like young squirrel." Another recounted how "I overcame prejudice against the bull frog and found him very nice." Dogs, cats, even mules, went into stew pots. At Vicksburg, Mississippi, for years after the war, it was said that the city was rat free. The starving Confederate garrison during the 1863 seige had caught and eaten them all.

Those hardships were often shared by soldier and civilian alike in a war that frequently blurred the distinctions of people in and out of uniform. Their experiences were no culinary lark, and were not so intended. Men ate to live, and lived to fight, and if their fare was not extravagant, still the heavy diet gave them protein, starch, and animal fats, to provide the energy needed for days of endless marching and the feverish heat of battle.